Today, Nintendo‘s Takaya Imamura announced that he is retiring from the company via his Facebook page and Twitter account, alongside a selfie of him standing outside Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto. For those who may not know, Imamura joined Nintendo as a graphic artist in 1989, meaning he has been with the company for over 30 years. The first game he worked on was the original F-Zero for the SNES.
Though not everyone may recognize his name, Imamura lent his talents as an artist/designer to many beloved Nintendo titles, including The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the N64 sequel to Ocarina of Time. Though the latter is regarded by many as one of the best video games of all time, fans of the former will argue that it’s the better of the two. It is famous for its much darker atmosphere and three-day time limit, with the young Link needing to regularly rewind time to prevent a horrific moon from crashing into the land of Termina.
Specifically, Imamura served as Majora’s Mask‘s art director and is responsible for creating the Moon, the titular mask itself, and the polarizing Tingle, who would go on to become a series regular, popping up in Wind Waker, becoming playable in Hyrule Warriors, and even getting his own game, Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. Said game even got a sequel, though it never released outside of Japan.
Imamura mostly worked on the F-Zero and Star Fox games, even managing to become a supervisor or producer on several of their titles. He’s also credited with creating F-Zero star Captain Falcon (who’s probably more famous now for his frequent appearances in Super Smash Bros.) and many members of the Star Fox cast, including Fox himself and Falco.
Both the F-Zero and Star Fox series’ seem to be being neglected by Nintendo at the moment. The last F-Zero game released for the Game Boy Advance in 2004 (and was exclusive to Japan) and fans have been begging for a new game ever since. Earlier this month, Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, who worked as producer on F-Zero GX, said that he’d be open to coming back to work on the series.
Star Fox has fared a bit better, with the last game being 2016’s Star Fox Zero for the Wii U, which Imamura was a supervisor on and acted as a pseudo-reboot of the series. It received mixed to positive reviews and though it was a sales success in the west, it underperformed in Japan, becoming the worst-selling entry in the series over there.
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